That's Not Really Super, Supergirl
There’s be a great deal of hoopla concerning this at-best-poorly-thought-out editorial, where Supergirl’s editor, Eddie Berganza, implores girls to read his comic. Condescending tone aside, what amazes me is Berganza complete failure to see why girls would have no reason to read Supergirl.
She’s just not very super, is she?
Superheroes, as a genre, are power fantasies. This is the issue many writers chafe at, as that the endings of a superhero comic are never in doubt. Good will prevail over Evil, the hero will never give up, the romantic interest will be saved, and all will be well by the last page. Even death, really, is just a minor setback. It’s juvenile escapism, but then, that’s what it’s supposed to be. Stories about heroes.
Supergirl just hasn’t been very heroic. Which, if you believe the editorial, was the point:
…It was decided to have Kara just try to be a real teenager. No standard hero on patrol bit here. We were gonna make Kara a typical teenager, which meant she wouldn't listen to the grownups (in her case a guy named Kal) and wouldn't appreciate being given chores (killing Kal for her dad, Zor-El). She'd just be a girl trying to find her place in the world.
Disregarding the fact that killing Superman is equated with “chores,” (what kind of teenage girls does Berganza and Co. hang out with, again?), does that sound like an exciting book to you? This is not “normal teenager by day, costumed champion by night,” of Spider-Man, or even the “superpowered teen does his best to live a normal, small-town life amongst the sci-fi chaos that threatens his friends and family” of SMALLVILLE’s Clark Kent. The focus here is on the girl, not the hero.
I was talking with Mae last night about Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room Of One’s Own-yes, we are total lit nerds in addition to being comic dorks-and how the trap of being female that Woolf describes in 1928 still exists today. Women and girls are still seen for little more than their sex, while men are seen for their actions and skills. No where is this more apparent than in science fiction, where often female characters are raped or get pregnant, simply because the writers don’t know what else to do with them (the webcomic Home On The Strange does a great job of pointing this out). This mirrors something I was talking with Dez about as well, about how the female characters in Firefly, are more than just girls, they’re intelligent and ass-kicking and sensual, often all at once like real people. The hard women are allowed to be soft, the soft women are allowed to be hard. They have abilities and plots that go beyond their reproductive abilities and sex appeal.
Of course, why should that be an issue with Supergirl ? What else could possibly be important to a woman besides babies? Maybe dressing like a Stupid Spoiled Whore, but I digress…
What’s most confusing is the creative team’s unwillingness to give Supergirl a secret identity, allowing her to be both a normal teenager and a super heroine at the same time. They did it once, in the best of Supergirl’s thirteen issues. In issue #10, Supergirl briefly attends highschool and manages to be both heroic and “normal.” Strangely, this concept was dropped the end of the issue, and we were back to a superpowered girl who managed to keep falling into situations of powerlessness. By focusing on the “girl” at the expense of the “super,” Berganza and Co. have denied female readers their power fantasy. So why then would a female superhero fan want to read a book that goes so directly against why they like superheroes in the first place?
A great deal of this is based on the writing, but even a cursory look at the covers of the series proves that this is not a character being drawn to accent her heroism. Most of the covers are poses, which would be fine, expect that disturbing number of them have Supergirl not looking at the reader, but off into space. This makes the Supergirl look much more unfocused than she could be, as well as giving the covers a creepy voyeur vibe. But what really stands out is how little action is in any of these covers of what is presumably an action book. How many of her covers show her punching a villain? None. The two (two!?! out of thirteen?!?) that show her in any sort of action at all, have her fighting heroes: the Teen Titans and Power Girl. Issue 13 could be considered an action shot, I guess, but it looks like Power Boy’s doing all the action. Supergirl isn’t even touching the presumably villainous robots.
Compare that to, say, the first thirteen issues of Amazing Spider-Man or even the early Birds Of Prey issues and you can clearly see the difference. This Supergirl isn’t a an action heroine; she’s a model.
In making what they thought would be a “typical teenager,” Berganza and Co. fell into the trap Virginia Woolf decried, not allowing Supergirl to be more than just a girl. They may have created a “typical teenager,” but they didn’t create a role model, an ass-kicker, or an interesting character. And they certainly haven’t created a hero.
So why should anyone read about her?